Top Lists Ranking Methodology

RateMyProfessors.com is the largest online destination for professor ratings. With more than 7,000 schools and 17 million ratings, RateMyProfessors.com is the highest trafficked free site for quickly researching and rating more than 1.6 million professors from colleges and universities across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

Each year, RateMyProfessors.com compiles Top Lists of the highest-rated professors, hottest professors, and top schools in the U.S. based on ratings from students.

The site uses a five-point Likert scale as well as a binary scoring system for students to rate professors. Below is a summary of the overall methodology used to compile the 2015 – 2016 rankings as well as notations for each of the categories*.

Professors are ranked according to the following methodology: Each individual professor rating is first standardized and, subsequently, the standardized scores for the past three years are weighted, putting more weight on recent years and less weight on ratings from the past (15 percent for 2014, 25 percent for 2015, 60 percent for 2016). Using the weighted score, professors are ranked from high to low. Only professors with 30 ratings or more are included to provide statistical significance.

It should also be noted that school size does not affect the outcome of the lists nor does it give professors from larger schools an advantage over their corollaries from smaller schools. RateMyProfessors.com performed a regression analysis on school size vs. number of ratings and found no noteworthy correlation. Here is a look at how each of the lists are compiled:

Highest Rated Professors
A professor’s Overall Quality rating informs the Top Professor lists: 5 is the highest rating and 1 is the lowest rating available to users when evaluating their professors. (Note that before May 18th, 2016, Overall Quality was calculated by averaging a professor’s separate “Helpfulness” and “Clarity” ratings, which formerly appeared on ratings pages.)

Hottest Professors
A professor who receives a chili pepper is considered “hot.” Chili peppers are awarded based on the sum of positive and negative (hot or not) ratings. For instance, if a professor receives 7 “hots” and 6 “nots” the “hots” will be counted as “+” and the “nots” as “-“. The sum of these (7-6) equals 1, meaning the professor will receive a chili pepper. If the result had been negative, the professor would not receive a chili pepper. Professors are ranked by highest numerical value in this case. For instance a -3 result is higher than a -4.

Highest Rated Schools
School rankings are based partially on the above professor ratings. In order to assemble a school’s rating, we include both its overall Professor Average rating, as well as its Overall School Rating which is an average of its campus ratings**. We weigh professor ratings and campus ratings equally (50 percent each), which implies that a top school scores high both in terms of academics as well as campus life. Similar to the professor ratings, in order to provide statistical significance, we only admit schools with at least 30 rated professors and 30 campus ratings. Using the resulting scores, schools are ranked from high to low.

* Data analysis is conducted with the help of Wolfgang Jank who is the Anderson Professor of Global Management in the Department of Information Systems and Decision Sciences at the University of South Florida.

** Campus Ratings is an element on RMP that allows students to rate schools based on reputation, location, career opportunities, safety, campus grounds and facilities, internet speed food on campus, clubs and events, social activities and whether or not the student is happy with their decision to attend the school.